“The sailor-man David Cairns called us together to see.  He’s been in the shadows among the panels ever since.  What he said I keep hearing again and again——­”

Beth laughed at the remarkable way Bedient was besieging her own studio, without appearing in person.  “But Vina, you’ve been living like a Hindu holy man, and no one can do that in New York, not even Hindus.  I order you to eat thrice daily and tire yourself physically——­”

“I eat,” Vina said, looking bored and helpless at the thought.  “I eat and I do enough physical work to tire a stone-mason——­”

“But I can see through you to the bone!  I think you only imagine you take nourishment.  Oh, Vina, I know your life—­handling huge hard things and making them lovely with pure spirit.  I must take better care of you.  Tell me all about it, if it will help.”

“Beth, please don’t talk about pure spirit, meaning me.  I used to be able to stand it, but not any more.  The Grey One does that.  I seem to suggest it to flesh and blood people....  I’m sure he didn’t see me so.  He looked at me, as if to say, oh, I don’t know what!...  I wish I were fish-cold!  I’m all overturned....  I just met Mary McCullom on the way over.”

Beth had forgotten the name for the moment.  She thought Vina was about to tell her of Bedient.

“Don’t you remember Mary McCullom, who tried painting for awhile, painted one after another, discolored and shapeless children, wholly bereft and unfortunate children?”

“Oh, yes,” said Beth.  “I heard she had married——­”

“That’s just it....  Do you remember how she used to look—­pinched, evaporated, as one looks in a factory blue-light?  I remember calling upon her, as she was giving up her last studio.  We sat on a packing-case, while they took out her pictures, one child after another, foundlings which had come to her, and which no one would take nor buy——­”

“Vina, you’re cruel to her!”

“Listen, and you’ll see whom I’m cruel to....  I remember telling her that day what a fearsome, ineffectual thing art is anyway....  How spooky thin she looked, and her face was yellow in patches!  My heart was wrung with her, the image of a little woman with no place, no heart to go to, all her dreams of girlhood turned to ghosts, fit only to run from.  Then she admitted that she might marry, that a man wanted her, but her wail was that she was mean and helpless, a failure; as such it was cowardly to let the man have her, hardly a square thing for a girl to do.  Well, I perked her up on that....  She took him; I don’t even know him by sight, but he’s a man, Beth Truba!  Mind you, here was a woman who said she was so dismayed and distressed and generally bowled over by living twenty-seven years, that she hadn’t the heart left to love anybody.  But he took her, and he’s a man——­”

“That seems to charm you,” Beth ventured. “’He took her, and he’s a man.’”